Billions of boxes of documents and records of legal or historic importance are stored in massive archives, warehouses and vaults. A standard cardboard banker's box for archival storage is 10×12×15 inches with a capacity of about 2,500 pieces of paper weighing about 25 pounds. There are estimated to be more than 6 billion boxes in commercial storage facilities in the United States. Billions more are stored by public agencies such as government units and archives.
The knowledge and information content represented by these stored records is nearly inaccessible due to extremely high cost of manual processes to locate the specific box in a massive warehouse that may contain tens of millions of similar boxes, transport those boxes to a facility, manually open the box, manually separate the attached groups manually remove the attachments, manually prepare the records for automated copy or scanning machines, perform the scanning function, then manually repackage the box and return the box to a warehouse or direct the contents of a box to a shredding facility.
Those processes rely upon fallible human beings, making them prone to lost or misplaced boxes and therefore lost information. The storage of paper for archival use exposes the contents to potential loss from water, fire and natural processes of decomposition. The reliance upon people in handling sensitive private, legal, financial or government secrets adds concerns for safety and security.